Usually, a time machine is understood as a transfer of consciousness to the past or future in such a way that your current consciousness can experience emotional sensations and thoughts related to the moment that you experienced in the past or will experience in the future. There is no point in discussing the possibility of changing the past or the future, since any possible changes that you can make in the past or future make it impossible for you to travel to the past or the future from the present.

There are many popular science articles, books, and films devoted to this paradox, the best of which, in my humble opinion, are the works of Stephen Hawking.

However, I am not talking about that now - not about the physical replacement of reality, which, as physicists know, is possible only on a miniature scale and in extraordinary conditions. I'm talking about real, feasible time travel. About the opportunity to feel in the present a significant part of what you feel in the past or feel in the future. What do I need to do:

1. Understand that time travel is possible in our minds.

2. Time travel actually always takes place simultaneously in the past and the future in the present.

3. To experience real time travel, you need to be healthy. This means that your current consciousness is not identified at the moment with the actor and the events taking place around - and your body automatically does what it should (according to our scientific physiological knowledge) do - that is, it repeats the best experience of life, studying its new manifestations.

Ready? Go!:

4. You can actually feel the thoughts and emotions that you felt, for example, in the recent past. This is easy to do in an experiment - for this you need any video device - for example, a computer with a webcam or a phone with a video camera.

5. Let's take a normal day, for example, a day off. It is quite obvious that, for example, when I write this post, my clock is 16 hours 45 minutes. In exactly 15 minutes, I will be in the future, which will be 17 hours. I can now, at 4:45 pm, record a video - a greeting from the “me” from my past to the “me” in my future. At the same time, by recording this video, I can really honestly address myself in the future - and, for example, feel how the future, more experienced and wise “I”, already participating in the “your local time machine” experiment, will feel, having received this message , at this moment you can feel what you will feel in the future, viewing this message to yourself - and you will feel it exactly in the present in which you will record this video.

6. Thus, at the moment of recording the video that I just talked about, for your thinking for a very short time (the time while you communicate with yourself) a tunnel will form that connects at the moment of the present, your past and your future - for everyone you "three" participating in this experiment - the present, past and future will have the same experiences ... And, by the way, very original. It is very interesting to get to know yourself this way.

7. And finally, the most important thing. For this to work, it is necessary that between all the “three” participants in the experiment - the “me-present”, “me-past” and “me-future” - there are honest relations - if you agreed on the experiment - you need to perform it - and in the designated time, the “me-real” should set your time machine into action when the future comes and the “me-real” will live the “me-future” – it is at this time that the “me-real” must necessarily watch the video greeting.

This is how a time loop will turn out - with the help of the "me-present" you will experience two interesting moments of your life in your present - in the first - you will be able to go in the present from the past to the future, and in the second - you will complete the experiment and feel your past from the future present . Experiment - no big deal - just a very interesting thought experiment that opens the door to the true nature of thinking and its meaning for your life. As soon as you learn how to travel short psychic distances, the doors to real travel will open before you - and miracles will become a reality.

Happy time travel!

The idea that you can get into the past or the future gave rise to a whole genre of chrono-fiction, and it seems that all possible paradoxes and pitfalls have long been known to us. Now we read and watch such works not for the sake of looking at other eras, but for the confusion that inevitably arises when trying to disrupt the flow of time. What tricks over time underlie all chrono-operas and what plots can be assembled from these building blocks? Let's figure it out.

Wake up when the future comes

The easiest task for a time traveler is to get into the future. In such stories, you don’t even have to think about exactly how the time stream works: since the future does not affect our time, the plot will hardly differ from a flight to another planet or to a fairy-tale world. In a sense, we are all already traveling through time - at a rate of one second per second. The only question is how to increase the speed.

In the XVIII-XIX centuries, dreams were considered one of the fantastic phenomena. A lethargic dream was adapted for traveling into the future: Rip van Winkle (the hero of the story of the same name by Washington Irving) slept for twenty years and found himself in a world where all his loved ones had already died, and he himself had been forgotten. Such a plot is akin to the Irish myths about the people of the hills, who also knew how to manipulate time: the one who spent one night under the hill returned after a hundred years.

This "hit" method never gets old

With the help of dreams, the writers of that time explained any fantastic assumptions. If the narrator himself admits that he has dreamed of outlandish worlds, what is the demand from him? Louis-Sebastien de Mercier resorted to such a trick when describing a "dream" about a utopian society ("Year 2440") - and this is already a full-fledged time travel!

However, if the journey to the future needs to be plausibly justified, it is also not difficult to do this without contradicting science. The cryo-freezing method famed by Futurama could, in theory, work - which is why many transhumanists now try to preserve their bodies after death in the hope that future medical technologies will allow them to be revived. True, in fact, this is just Van Winkle’s dream adapted to modern times, so it’s hard to say whether this is considered a “real” journey.

faster than light

For those who want to seriously play with time and delve into the wilds of physics, travel at the speed of light is better suited.

Einstein's theory of relativity makes it possible to compress and stretch time at near-light speeds, which is used in science fiction with pleasure. The famous “twin paradox” says that if you rush through space at near-light speed for a long time, a couple of centuries will pass on Earth in a year or two of such flights.

Moreover, the mathematician Gödel proposed a solution for Einstein's equations in which time loops can appear in the universe - something like portals between different times. It was this model that was used in the film "", first showing the difference in the flow of time near the horizon of a black hole, and then throwing a bridge into the past with the help of a "wormhole".

Einstein and Gödel already had all the plot twists that the authors of chrono-operas are now thinking up (filmed on iPhone 5)

Is it possible to get into the past in this way? Scientists strongly doubt this, but their doubts do not interfere with science fiction writers. Suffice it to say that only mere mortals are forbidden to exceed the speed of light. And Superman can make a couple of revolutions around the Earth and go back in time to prevent the death of Lois Lane. Why is there the speed of light - even sleep can work in the opposite direction! And at Mark Twain, the Yankees received a crowbar on the head and at the court of King Arthur.

Of course, flying into the past is more interesting - just because it is inextricably linked with the present. If the author introduces a time machine into a story, he usually wants to at least confuse the reader with time paradoxes. But most often the main theme in such stories is the struggle with predestination. Is it possible to change one's own destiny if it is already known?

Cause or effect?

The answer to the question of predestination - like the very concept of time travel - depends on how time works in a particular fantasy world.

The laws of physics are not a decree for terminators

In reality, the main problem with traveling into the past is not the speed of light. Sending anything, even a message, back in time would violate a fundamental law of nature: the principle of causality. Even the most seedy prophecy is already, in a sense, time travel! All scientific principles known to us are based on the fact that first an event occurs, and then it has consequences. If the effect is ahead of the cause, it breaks the laws of physics.

To “fix” the laws, we need to figure out how the world reacts to such an anomaly. This is where science fiction writers give free rein to the imagination.

If the genre of the film is a comedy, then there is usually no risk of “breaking” time: all the actions of the characters are too insignificant to affect the future, and the main task is to get out of their own problems

It can be said that time is a single and indivisible stream: between the past and the future, a thread is stretched, as it were, along which you can move.

It is in this picture of the world that the most famous loops and paradoxes arise: for example, if you kill your grandfather in the past, you can disappear from the universe. There are paradoxes due to the fact that this concept (philosophers call it "B-theory") states that the past, present and future are as real and unchanging as the three dimensions we are used to. The future is still unknown - but sooner or later we will see the only version of events that must happen.

Such fatalism gives rise to the most ironic stories about time travelers. When an alien from the future tries to fix the events of the past, he suddenly discovers that he himself caused them - moreover, it has always been so. Time in such worlds is not rewritten - a causal loop simply appears in it, and any attempts to change something only reinforce the original version. This paradox was one of the first to be described in detail in the short story "On His Own Footsteps" (1941), where it turns out that the hero was carrying out a task received from himself.

The heroes of the gloomy series "Darkness" from Netflix go back in time to investigate a crime, but involuntarily they are forced to do the things that lead to this crime.

It happens even worse: in more “flexible” worlds, a careless act of a traveler can lead to a “butterfly effect”. Intervention in the past rewrites the entire time stream at once - and the world not only changes, but completely forgets that it has changed. Usually only the traveler himself remembers that everything was different before. In the trilogy "", even Doc Brown could not follow Marty's jumps - but he at least relied on the words of a friend when he described the changes, and usually no one believes such stories.

In general, single-threaded time is a confusing and hopeless thing. Many authors decide not to limit themselves and resort to the help of parallel worlds.

The plot, in which the hero finds himself in a world where someone canceled his birth, came from the Christmas film It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

The bifurcation of time

This concept not only allows you to get rid of contradictions, but also captures the imagination. In such a world, everything is possible: every second it is divided into an infinite number of reflections similar to each other, differing in a couple of little things. The time traveler does not really change anything, but only jumps between different facets of the multiverse. Such a plot is very popular in TV shows: in almost any show there is a series where the characters find themselves in an alternative future and try to return everything to normal. On an endless field, you can frolic endlessly - and there are no paradoxes!

Now in chrono-fiction, the model with parallel worlds is most often used (frame from Star Trek)

But the most interesting thing begins when the authors abandon the "B-theory" and decide that there is no fixed future. Maybe uncertainty and uncertainty is the normal state of time? In such a picture of the world, specific events occur only on those segments on which there are observers, and the rest of the moments are just a probability.

An excellent example of such "quantum time" was shown by Stephen King in "". When the Gunslinger unwittingly created a time paradox, he almost went insane because he remembered two lines of events at the same time: in one he traveled alone, in the other with a companion. If the hero came across evidence reminiscent of past events, the memories of these points formed into one consistent version, but the gaps were like in a fog.

The quantum approach has recently become popular, partly due to the development of quantum physics, and partly because it allows us to show even more intricate and dramatic paradoxes.

Marty McFly almost erased himself from reality by preventing his parents from meeting. I had to fix it right now!

Take, for example, the film Loop of Time (2012): as soon as the young incarnation of the hero performed some actions, an alien from the future immediately remembered them - and before that, fog reigned in his memory. Therefore, he tried not to interfere once again in his past - for example, he did not show his young self a photograph of his future wife, so as not to disrupt their first unexpected meeting.

The "quantum" approach is also visible in "": since the Doctor warns satellites about special "fixed points" - events that cannot be changed or bypassed - it means that the rest of the fabric of time is mobile and plastic.

However, even the probabilistic future pales in comparison with worlds where Time has its own will - or it is guarded by creatures that lie in wait for travelers. In such a universe, laws can work in any way - and it's good if you can negotiate with the guards! The most striking example is the langoliers, who, after every midnight, eat yesterday along with everyone who was unfortunate enough to be there.

How the time machine works

Against the background of such a variety of universes, the technique of time travel itself is a secondary issue. Since the time of the time machine, they have not changed: you can come up with a new principle of operation, but this is unlikely to affect the plot, and from the outside, the journey will look about the same.

Wells' time machine in the 1960 film adaptation. That's where the steampunk is!

Most often, the principle of operation is not explained at all: a person climbs into a booth, admires the buzz and special effects, and then gets out at a different time. This method can be called an instant jump: the fabric of time seems to be pierced at one point. Often, for such a jump, you first need to accelerate - pick up speed in ordinary space, and the technique will already translate this impulse into a jump in time. So did the heroine of the anime "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time", and Doc Brown on the famous DeLorean from the "Back to the Future" trilogy. Apparently, the fabric of time is one of those obstacles that storm with a running start!

DeLorean DMC-12 is a rare time machine that deserves to be called a machine (JMortonPhoto.com & OtoGodfrey.com)

But sometimes the opposite happens: if we consider time as the fourth dimension, in the three ordinary dimensions the traveler must remain in place. The time machine will rush him along the time axis, and in the past or future he will appear at exactly the same point. The main thing is that they do not have time to build anything there - the consequences can be very unpleasant! True, such a model does not take into account the rotation of the Earth - in fact, there are no fixed points - but in the extreme case, everything can be attributed to magic. This is how it worked: each revolution of the magic clock corresponded to one hour, but the travelers did not move from their place.

The most severe of all such “static” travels was done in the film “Detonator” (2004): there the time machine squandered exactly one minute for a minute. To get to yesterday, you had to sit in an iron box for 24 hours!

Sometimes a model with more than three dimensions is interpreted even more cunningly. Let us recall Gödel's theory, according to which loops and tunnels can be laid between different times. If it is correct, you can try to get through additional dimensions to another time - which the hero "" took advantage of.

In earlier fiction, a "time vortex" worked on a similar principle: a kind of subspace where you can get into it on purpose (on Doctor Who's TARDIS) or by accident, as happened with the crew of the destroyer in the movie The Philadelphia Experiment (1984). Flying through the funnel is usually accompanied by dizzying special effects, and leaving the ship is not recommended, so as not to get lost in time forever. But in fact, this is still the same ordinary time machine, delivering passengers from one year to another.

For some reason, lightning always strikes inside temporary funnels and sometimes credits fly

If the authors do not want to delve into the jungle of theories, the anomaly of time can exist on its own, without any adaptations. It is enough to enter the wrong door, and now the hero is already in the distant past. Is it a tunnel, a pinhole or magic - who will take it apart? The main question is how to get back!

What can't be done

However, usually science fiction still works according to the rules, albeit fictional, - therefore, restrictions are often invented for time travel. For example, one can say, following modern physicists, that it is still impossible to move bodies faster than the speed of light (that is, into the past). But in some theories there is a particle called "tachyon", which is not affected by this limitation, because it has no mass ... Maybe consciousness or information can still be sent into the past?

When Makoto Shinkai takes on time travel, he still comes up with a touching story of friendship and love ("Your Name")

In reality, most likely, it will not work to cheat like that - all because of the same principle of causality, which does not care about the type of particles. But in science fiction, the "informational" approach seems more plausible - and even more original. It allows the hero, for example, to be in his own young body or go on a journey through other people's minds, as happened with the hero of the Quantum Leap series. And in the Steins;Gate anime, at first they only knew how to send SMS to the past - try to change the course of history with such restrictions! But plots only benefit from limitations: the more difficult the task, the more interesting it is to watch how it is solved.

A hybrid phone with a microwave to connect with the past (Steins;Gate)

Sometimes additional conditions are imposed on ordinary, physical time travel. For example, often a time machine cannot send anyone back in time before the moment when it was invented. And in the anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, time travelers forgot how to go into the past beyond a certain date, because on that day a catastrophe occurred that damaged the fabric of time.

And here the most interesting begins. Plain jumps into the past and even time paradoxes are just the tip of the chrono-fiction iceberg. If time can be changed or even corrupted, what else can be done with it?

Paradox upon paradox

We love time travel for its confusion. Even a simple leap into the past generates twists like the butterfly effect and the grandpa paradox, depending on how time works. But using this technique, you can build much more complex combinations: for example, jump into the past not once, but several times in a row. This creates a stable time loop, or Groundhog Day.

Do you have deja vu?
"Haven't you already asked me about this?"

You can loop for one day or several - the main thing is that everything ends with a “reset” of all changes and a journey back to the past. If we are dealing with linear and unchanging time, such loops themselves arise from causal paradoxes: the hero receives a note, goes to the past, writes this note, sends it to himself ... If time is rewritten every time or creates parallel worlds, it turns out to be an ideal trap : a person experiences the same events over and over again, but any changes still end up resetting to the original position.

Most often, such plots are devoted to attempts to unravel the cause of the time loop and break out of it. Sometimes the loops are tied to the emotions or tragic fates of the characters - this element is especially loved in anime ("Magical Girl Madoka", "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya", "When Cicadas Cry").

But "groundhog days" have a definite plus: they allow, due to endless attempts, sooner or later to succeed in any endeavor. No wonder Doctor Who, having fallen into such a trap, recalled the legend of a bird that for many thousands of years grinded away a stone rock crumbly, and his colleague managed to bring an extraterrestrial demon to white heat with his “negotiations”! In this case, you can destroy the loop not with a heroic deed or insight, but with ordinary perseverance - and along the way, learn a couple of useful skills, as happened with the hero of Groundhog Day.

In "Edge of Tomorrow" aliens use time loops as a weapon - to calculate the perfect battle tactics

Another way to build a more complex structure from ordinary jumps is to synchronize two segments of time. In the movie "X-Men: Days of Future Past" and in "Time Scout", the time portal could only be opened at a fixed distance. Roughly speaking, at noon on Sunday, you can move to noon on Saturday, and an hour later - already at one in the afternoon. With such a restriction, an element appears in the story about a journey into the past, which, it would seem, cannot be there - time pressure! Yes, you can go back and try to fix something, but in the future, time goes on as usual - and the hero, for example, may be late to return.

To complicate the traveler's life, you can make time jumps random - take away control over what is happening from him. In the TV series Lost, such a disaster happened to Desmond, who interacted too closely with a temporary anomaly. But back in the 1980s, the series Quantum Leap was built on the same idea. The hero constantly found himself in different bodies and eras, but did not know how long he would last in this time - and even more so he could not return "home".

We twist the time

The heroine of the game Life is Strange faces a difficult choice: to undo all the changes that she made to the fabric of time in order to save her friend, or to destroy the whole city

The second technique with which to diversify time travel is to change the speed. If you can skip a couple of years to find yourself in the past or the future, why not, for example, put time on pause?

As Wells showed in the story "The Newest Accelerator", even slowing down time for everyone except yourself is a very powerful tool, and even if you stop it completely, you can secretly penetrate somewhere or win a duel - and completely unnoticed by the enemy. And in the web series "Worm" one superhero was able to "freeze" objects in time. With the help of this simple technique, it was possible, for example, to derail a train by placing an ordinary sheet of paper in its path - after all, an object frozen in time cannot change or move!

Enemies frozen in time are very convenient. In the Quantum Break shooter, you can see this for yourself

The speed can also be changed to a negative one, and then you get the counterwinds familiar to readers of the Strugatskys - people living "in the opposite direction." This is possible only in worlds where the "B-theory" works: the entire time axis is already predetermined, the only question is in what order we perceive it. To further confuse the plot, you can launch two time travelers in different directions. This is what happened to the Doctor and River Song in the Doctor Who series: they jumped back and forth through the eras, but the first (for the Doctor) their meeting for River was the last, the second - the penultimate one, and so on. To avoid paradoxes, the heroine had to be careful not to accidentally spoil his future to the Doctor. Then, however, the order of their meetings turned into a complete leapfrog, but the heroes of Doctor Who are no strangers to this!

Worlds with "static" time give rise not only to counter-motors: creatures often appear in science fiction who simultaneously see all points of their life path. Thanks to this, the Trafalmadorians from Slaughterhouse Five treat any misadventures with philosophical humility: for them, even death is just one of the many details of the overall picture. Doctor Manhattan from "" because of such an inhuman perception of time, moved away from people and fell into fatalism. Abraxas from The Endless Journey regularly messed up grammar, trying to figure out which event had already happened and which would happen tomorrow. And the aliens from Ted Chan's story "The Story of Your Life" had a special language: everyone who learned it also began to see the past, present and future at the same time.

The movie "Arrival", based on "The Story of Your Life", begins with flashbacks ... Or not?

However, if countermeasures or Trafalmadorians really travel in time, then with the abilities of Quicksilver or the Flash, everything is not so obvious. After all, in fact, it is they who are accelerating relative to everyone else - how can we assume that the whole world around is actually slowing down?

Physicists will notice that the theory of relativity is called that way for a reason. It is possible to speed up the world and slow down the observer - this is the same thing, the only question is what to take as a starting point. And biologists will say that there is no fantasy here, because time is a subjective concept. An ordinary fly also sees the world "in slow-mo" - so quickly its brain processes signals. But you can not limit yourself to the fly or the Flash, because in some chrono-operas there are parallel worlds. Who prevents them from letting time pass at different speeds - or even in different directions?

A well-known example of such a technique is the Chronicles of Narnia, where there is no formal time travel. But time in Narnia flows much faster than on Earth, so the same heroes fall into different eras - and observe the history of a fairy-tale country from its creation to its fall. But in Homestuck, which is perhaps the most confusing story about time travel and parallel worlds, two worlds were launched in different directions - and the contacts between these universes had the same confusion that the Doctor had with River Song.

If clock faces haven't been invented yet, the hourglass will do too (Prince of Persia)

kill time

Any of these devices can be used to write a story that would make even Wells' head crack. But modern authors are happy to use the entire palette at once, tying time loops and parallel worlds into a ball. Paradoxes with this approach accumulate in batches. Even with one jump into the past, a traveler can inadvertently kill his grandfather and disappear from reality - or even become his own father. Perhaps, he mocked the “paradox of causality” best of all in the story “All you zombies”, where the hero turns out to be both his own father and mother.

Based on the story "All You Zombies", the film "Time Patrol" (2014) was made. Almost all of his characters are the same person.

Of course, paradoxes must be somehow resolved - therefore, in worlds with linear time, it is often restored by itself, by the will of fate. For example, almost all first-time travelers decide to kill Hitler first. In worlds where time can be rewritten, he will die (but according to the law of meanness, the resulting world will be even worse). Asprin's attempt in "Time Scouts" will fail: either the gun will jam, or something else will happen.

And in worlds where fatalism is not respected, you have to monitor the safety of the past yourself: for such cases, they create a special “time police” that catches travelers before they do trouble. In the film Looper, the role of such police was taken over by the mafia: the past for them is too valuable a resource to be allowed to spoil it.

If there is no fate, no chronopolice, travelers run the risk of simply breaking time. At best, it will turn out like in Jasper Fforde’s “Thursday Nonetoth” cycle, where the time police played to the point that they accidentally canceled the very invention of time travel. At worst, the fabric of reality will collapse.

As Doctor Who has repeatedly shown, time is a fragile thing: a single explosion can cause cracks in the universe across all eras, and an attempt to rewrite a “fixed point” can collapse both the past and the future. In Homestuck, after such an incident, the world had to be recreated, and in all eras they mixed together, which is why the events of the books can no longer be combined into a consistent chronology ... Well, in the manga Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, the son of his own clone, erased from reality, had to replace himself with a new person, so that in the events that have already happened there was at least some character.

Some heroes of the Tsubasa multiverse exist in at least three incarnations and come from other works of the same studio

Fans' favorite pastime is to draw for the most intricate pieces of chronology

Sound crazy? But for such madness, we love time travel - they push the boundaries of logic. Sometime, it must be, even a simple leap into the past could drive an unaccustomed reader crazy. Now, chrono-fiction truly shines at long distances, when the authors have room to turn around, and time loops and paradoxes are layered on top of each other, giving rise to the most unimaginable combinations.

Alas, it often happens that the construction develops under its own weight: either there are too many jumps in time to make sense to follow them, or the authors change the rules of the universe on the go. How many times has Skynet rewritten the past? And who can say now how time works in Doctor Who?

On the other hand, if chrono-fiction, with all its paradoxes, turns out to be harmonious and internally consistent, it is remembered for a long time. This is what bribes BioShock Infinite, Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle or Homestuck. The more complex and intricate the plot, the stronger the impression left on those who got to the end and managed to look at the whole canvas at once.

* * *

Time travel, parallel worlds and the rewriting of reality are inextricably linked, which is why almost no science fiction work can do without them now - whether it's fantasy like "Game of Thrones" or science fiction exploration of the latest theories of physics, like in "Interstellar". Few plots give the same scope for imagination - after all, in a story where any event can be canceled or repeated several times, everything is possible. At the same time, the elements that make up all these stories are quite simple.

It seems that over the past hundred years, the authors have done everything possible with time: they let them go forward, backward, in a circle, in one stream and in several ... Therefore, the best of these stories, as in all genres, are based on characters: on the one who came again from ancient Greek tragedies to the theme of the struggle with fate, on attempts to correct one's own mistakes and on the difficult choice between different branches of events. But no matter how the chronology jumps, history will still develop in only one direction - in the one that is most interesting to viewers and readers.

To get into the past and into the future. Although many have the audacity to disagree with the light and offer their own theories. However, they are all questionable, because they have not been tested; there is no documentary evidence of their success, and the scientists themselves are not sure. Everyone knows that this is possible, but they have not decided how.

Anyway, the idea to move in time is a very strange thing. How many temporary collapses are waiting for us, plus the emergence of alternative universes in which we will be confused like mental patients in straitjackets. And is it worth going to the past if 6,000 Earth years pass after returning to Earth, while the journey took no more than a day? Deal with the present before ruining the past. In the end, if it were not for Hitler and the Second World War, then most of our grandparents would hardly have married each other. There were all sorts of situations, novels at the front and evacuations. Yes, and there was not much choice. Well, God bless him, it's not about that. It's about something that's not written in the Bible.

1. Punch the future with your forehead

Here is the most primitive of all theories: you need to run as fast as you can until you reach and pierce the future with your forehead. And what is most strange: in fact, this statement is absolutely true. The faster you walk, the further you fly.

This has been the subject of many experiments. For example, in 1971 an experiment was conducted. In order not to delve into the technical component, let's say briefly: the research team flew around the Earth until time travel occurred. No, for real. They loaded the atomic clock onto the plane and flew east until they returned to where they started. When the researchers landed, clocks on Earth were 60 nanoseconds ahead of aircraft clocks. In other words, the clock on the plane was effectively pushed 60 nanoseconds into the future. The explorers then flew off in a different direction. This time, the aviation clock was 270 nanoseconds ahead of the earth clock.

This is explained by the fact that the clock on Earth was not stationary, because it was on the rotating surface of the planet. The clocks on the plane flying west ran slower, so everything on Earth slowed down by comparison. It turns out that the famous scene where Superman flies around the Earth and turns back time is just the fruit of the screenwriter's sick brain.

By the way, consider this type of time travel in our pocket. Your phone is connected to GPS satellites, which have to be corrected for slowing down (satellites have their own time course). If this is not done, the navigation system will take you to the crack den of the neighboring area instead of the nearest KFC.

Let's assume that a car has already been invented that actually allows you to travel in this way. We reach speed and jump not by 60 nanoseconds, but by 60 years. A few minutes or a few hours around the planet, and then - boom! - bright future!

Only now, can you live in this future, where everyone has forgotten you, and if they remember you, then only as an asshole who spins around the Earth endlessly?

2. Dense holey objects of comic proportions

If you have seen Interstellar, then the essence of the theory should be clear. The closer you are to a large, dense object, the slower time passes. For you.

Massive time travel is already happening. Scientists fired a huge laser 10,000 kilometers up. Sometimes science is left with no other choice but to shoot from a mega-gun into space. But the experiment confirmed that time really moves at different speeds depending on the distance to gravity.

And what did this shot give? Nothing, once again confirmed the theory that time flows much more slowly near a supermassive object. Closer to the Earth, the passage of time is not as fast as in the layers of the stratosphere. So, if someone suddenly decides to use the mass of Jupiter for travel, then good luck. It is enough to compress the mass of the planet to the size of a tin can, and then travel will become 2 times faster. And you don’t have to fly to, which is not only supermassive, but also a real galactic time machine: time flows around it very slowly.

The strangest part of this theory is that a similar journey is already happening to you right now. In fact, it happens everywhere, not just in the magical horizons of some mysterious black hole on the other side of the galaxy. The core of the Earth moves in time more slowly than people standing at a bus stop in Makhachkala. When you stand, your butt ages more slowly than your face (although it would be better the other way around). We don't need a car to travel through time. We just need something huge nearby, like the ego of Milonov or the carcass of Stas Baretsky. Although, even if such a machine using a monstrous mass is created, then a crowd of protesters will instantly appear, fearing a cosmic collapse and the fact that the Earth's axis will shift, and Snoop Dogg will become president.

3. Wormholes and Krasnikov's pipes

You cannot travel through space and time faster than the speed of light, but with Krasnikov's pipes this problem is instantly solved. You just cut a tunnel through space and time and go back and forth like one of those green pipes in Super Mario. Here, too, there is an entrance, an exit, and most importantly - the journey goes very quickly, regardless of the distance, so it is unlikely to get bored.

Such "wormholes" are not a physical object, but a distortion of space and time. Schematically, it looks like this: two layers of space bend in a certain place until they touch each other, like underpants stuck in the ass.

The main advantages of pipes are that they can be created artificially, and the biggest plus is that the traveler returns there exactly at the same time from which he began the journey. But remember: cutting a window to new stars located at a distance of 3000 light years, you risk getting into an intergalactic war.

In 1993, University of Wellington professor Matt Visser noted that two entrances to wormholes with an induced time difference could not be combined without a quantum field and gravitational effects that would cause the wormholes to collapse or repel each other. Simply put, the mass will increase, which will only destroy the unfortunate pipes. In addition, this method of movement does not, in fact, violate the so-called universal speed limit - the speed limit of light - because the ship itself does not move faster than light. The wormhole shortens the path not only in space, but also in time.

4. Mexican bubbles

Traveling faster than light is as real as milking a female unicorn and giving that milk to a malevolent leprechaun. So stop thinking about it - it's stupid and unrealistic.

So everyone thought, until in the 90s the Mexican scientist Miguel Alcubierre did not think about a bubble that compresses the space in front of it and expands it behind it. All that is needed for this is tons of negative energy (we are not talking about envy, murder, apathy, speeches by Vladimir Solovyov). The idea was purely theoretical and even fantastic. Given the existence of negative energy, moving a bubble 200 meters in diameter would require energy equivalent to the mass of Jupiter. Here you can’t get by with the Solovyovs - you will have to connect Kurginyan.

However, in the last few years, modifications of his idea have been proposed, in which the "bubble" was replaced by a torus, and the negative energy turned out to be completely unnecessary. In this case, calculations show the need for energy contained in just hundreds of kilograms of mass. Even an experiment was carried out that proved that space is perfectly curved without negative energy. But there is one problem: the bubble is sensitive, like a virgin in the first experience with a woman, and too many extraneous facts can confuse him.

5. A cylinder in some galaxy

What is a Tipler Cylinder? Somewhere in space, approximately to the left of Betlgeuse, there is a rotating cylinder. You take a ship and happily go there. When you get close enough to the surface of the cylinder (the space around it will be mostly deformed), you will need to go around it several times and return to Earth. Reminiscent of the Buryat shamanic rite, but with the cosmos, everything is not always simple. But you will arrive in the past. How far depends on how many times you go around the cylinder in orbit. Even if your own time seems to be moving forward as usual, as you circle the cylinder, outside of the distorted space, you will inevitably move into the past. It's like running up an escalator going down.

It remains only to find this cylinder. Apparently, this is something very big and long, like ... films by Nikita Mikhalkov. But so far no one has seen them. Not in a telescope, not in any other instruments. The astronauts were asked - they also did not see. The cylinder is a hypothetical thing, verified from Einstein's equations, and therefore no one knows how this journey will turn out.

The paradoxes of time travel regularly occupy the minds of not only scientists who comprehend the possible consequences of such a movement (albeit hypothetical), but also people who are completely far from science. Surely you have argued with your friends more than once about what will happen if you see yourself in the past - like many science fiction authors, writers and directors. Today, the film with Ethan Hawke in the lead role, Time Patrol, based on the story of one of the best science fiction writers of all time, Robert Heinlein, was just released. This year has already been a success of several films relating to the theme of time like "Interstellar" or "Edge of Tomorrow". We decided to speculate what potential dangers might await the heroes of temporary sci-fi, from killing their predecessors to splitting reality.

Text: Ivan Sorokin

Paradox of the dead grandfather

The most common, and at the same time the most understandable of the paradoxes that overtake the time traveler. The answer to the question “what will happen if you kill your own grandfather (father, mother, etc.) in the past?” may sound different - the most popular outcome is the occurrence of a parallel time sequence, erasing the culprit from history. In any case, for the temponaut himself (this word, by analogy with "astronaut" and "astronaut", sometimes refers to the pilot of the time machine), this does not bode well at all.

Movie example: The whole story about teenager Marty McFly, who accidentally travels to 1955, is built on preventing an analogue of this paradox. Having accidentally conquered his own mother, Marty begins to literally disappear - first from photographs, and then from tangible reality. There are many reasons why the first film in the Back to the Future trilogy can be considered an absolute classic, but one of them is how neatly the script sidesteps the idea of ​​potential incest. Of course, in terms of the scale of the idea, this example can hardly be compared with the well-known plot from Futurama, as a result of which Fry still becomes his own grandfather, accidentally destroying the one who was supposed to become this grandfather; in the end, this event had consequences that literally affected the entire universe of the animated series.

Pulling yourself by your hair

The second most common time travel plot in cinema: going to a glorious past from a terrible future and trying to change it, the hero ends up causing his own (or everyone's) troubles. Something similar can happen in a positive context: the fairy-tale assistant who directs the plot turns out to be the hero himself, who came from the future and ensures the correct course of events. This logic of the development of what is happening can hardly be called a paradox: the so-called time loop is closed here and everything happens exactly as it should, but in the context of the interaction of cause and effect, the human brain still cannot but perceive this situation as paradoxical. This technique is named, as you might guess, in honor of Baron Munchausen, who pulls himself out of the swamp.

Movie example: In the space epic Interstellar (spoiler alert) there are a huge number of plot twists of varying degrees of predictability, but the emergence of a "closed loop" is almost the main twist: Christopher Nolan's humanistic message that love is stronger than gravity takes its final form only in at the very end of the film, when it turns out that the spirit of the bookshelf, protecting the astrophysicist performed by Jessica Chastain, was the hero Matthew McConaughey, sending messages to the past from the bowels of a black hole.

The Bill Murray Paradox

Plots about looped time loops have already become a separate subgenre of sci-fi about temponauts for some time - both in literature and in cinema. It is not surprising that almost any such work is automatically compared to Groundhog Day, which over the years has come to be seen not only as a parable of existential despair and the desire to appreciate life, but also as an amusing exploration of the possibilities of behavior and self-development in extremely limited conditions. The main paradox here lies not in the presence of a loop itself (the nature of this process is not always touched upon in such plots), but in the temponaut’s incredible memory (it is she who is able to provide any movement of the plot) and the equally incredible inertness of those around him to all the evidence. that the protagonist's position is truly unique.

Movie example: Detractors have dubbed "Edge of Tomorrow" something like "Groundhog Day with aliens," but in fact the script for one of the best science fiction films of the year (which, by the way, was super-successful for this genre) handles its loops much more delicately. The paradox of perfect memory is bypassed here as a result of the fact that the protagonist writes down and thinks through his moves, interacting with other characters, and the problem of empathy is solved by the fact that there is another character in the film who at some point had similar skills. By the way, the occurrence of a loop is also explained here.

Deceived expectations

The problem of not meeting expectations is always present in our lives - but in the case of time travel, it can hurt especially badly. Usually this plot device is used as an embodiment of the proverb "Be careful what you wish for" and works according to Murphy's laws: if events can develop in the worst possible way, then everything will happen. Since it is difficult to assume that a time traveler is able to predict in advance what the tree of possible outcomes of his or her actions will look like, the viewer rarely doubts the plausibility of such plots.

Movie example: One of the saddest scenes in the recent rom-com "Future Boyfriend" looks like this: Domhnall Gleason's temponaut tries to go back in time to the time before the birth of his child and ends up coming home to a complete stranger. This is corrected, but as a result of such a collision, the hero realizes that more restrictions are imposed on his movements along the temporary arrow than he thought before.

Aristotle with smartphone

This paradox is a special case of the popular sci-fi trope "advanced technology in a backward world" - only the "world" here is not another planet, but our own past. It is not difficult to guess what the introduction of a conditional pistol into the world of conditional batons is fraught with: the deification of aliens from the future, destructive violence, a change in the way of life in a particular community, and the like.

Movie example: Of course, the Terminator franchise should serve as the most striking example of the destructive influence of such an invasion: it is the appearance of androids in the United States in the 1980s that ultimately leads to the emergence of artificial intelligence Skynet, which literally destroys humanity. Moreover, the main reason for the creation of Skynet is given by the protagonists Kyle Reese and Sarah Connor, due to the actions of which the main Terminator chip falls into the hands of Cyberdyne, from the depths of which Skynet eventually emerges.

The hard part of remembering

What happens to the temponaut's memory when, as a result of his own actions, the temporary arrow itself changes? The gigantic stress that must inevitably arise in such a case is often ignored by science fiction authors, but the ambiguity of the hero's position cannot be ignored. Well, there are a lot of questions here (and all of them do not have an unambiguous answer - to adequately check the answers to them, you need to literally get a time machine in your hands): does the temponaut remember all events or only part of them? Do two parallel universes coexist in the temponaut's memory? Does he perceive his changed friends and relatives as different people? What happens if you tell people from the new timeline in detail about their counterparts in the previous timeline?

Movie example: There is at least one example of such a state in almost every time travel movie; from a recent one, Wolverine from the last series of X-Men immediately comes to mind. The idea that as a result of the success of the operation, Hugh Jackman's character will be the only one who can remember the original (extremely gloomy) course of events, is voiced several times in the film; in the end, Wolverine is so happy to see all his friends again that memories that can hurt even a person with an adamantium skeleton fade into the background.

scary you #2

Neuroscientists are quite active in studying how people perceive their appearance; an important aspect of this is the reaction to twins and twins. Typically, such meetings are characterized by an increased level of anxiety, which is not surprising: the brain ceases to adequately perceive the position in space and begins to confuse external and internal signals. Now imagine how a person must feel, seeing himself - but of a different age.

Movie example: The interaction of the protagonist with himself is perfectly played out in Rian Johnson's film Looper, where the young Joseph Simmons is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in cunning makeup, and the elderly, who arrived from the near future, is played by Bruce Willis. Cognitive discomfort and the inability to establish normal contact is one of the important themes of the picture.

Unfulfilled predictions

Your opinion about whether such events are paradoxical depends directly on whether you personally adhere to a deterministic model of the universe. If there is no free will as such, then a skilled temponaut can safely bet huge amounts of money on various sports competitions, predict the results of elections and award ceremonies, invest in shares of the right companies, solve crimes, and so on. If, as is usually the case in films about time travel, the actions of the temponaut are still able to change the future, then the function and role of predictions based on a kind of insight from a stranger from the future are as ambiguous as in the case of those predictions that are based solely on on logic and past experience (that is, similar to those that are used now).

Movie example: Despite the fact that only "mental" time travel appears in "Minority Report", the plot of this film serves as a vivid illustration for both models of the universe: both deterministic and free will. The plot revolves around the prediction of crimes that have not yet been committed with the help of "clairvoyants" who are able to visualize the intentions of potential killers (a situation of extreme determinism). Toward the end of the film, it turns out that visions are still able to change in time - accordingly, a person to some extent determines his own fate.

I was yesterday into tomorrow

In most of the world's major languages, there are multiple tenses for events in the past, present, and future. But what about the temponaut, who yesterday could observe the death of the Sun, and today he is already in the company of dinosaurs? What tenses to use in speech and writing? In Russian, English, Japanese and many other languages, there is simply no such functionality - and you have to get out in such a way that something comical inevitably happens.

Movie example: Doctor Who, of course, belongs to the field of television, not cinema (although several television films can be found in the list of works related to the franchise), but the series cannot be left out here. The Doctor's confusing use of different times became a cause for bullying back in pre-Internet times, and after the revival of the series in the mid-2000s, the authors decided to deliberately emphasize this detail: now the on-screen Doctor is able to connect his non-linear perception of time with the peculiarities of the language (and at the same time laugh at the resulting phrases) .

multiverse

The most fundamental paradox of time travel is not for nothing that it is directly related to a serious conceptual discussion in quantum mechanics, based on the acceptance or rejection of the concept of a “multiverse” (that is, a collection of multiple universes). What actually needs to happen the moment you "change the future"? Do you remain yourself - or do you become a copy of yourself in a different timeline (and, accordingly, in a different universe)? Do all the timelines co-exist in parallel so that you just jump from one to the other? If the number of decisions that change the course of events is infinite, then is the number of parallel universes infinite? Does this mean that the multiverse is infinite in size?

Movie example: The idea of ​​multiple parallel timelines is usually not adequately portrayed in films for one simple reason: writers and directors become afraid that no one will understand them. But Shane Carratt, the author of The Detonator, is not like that: to understand the plot of this film, where one non-linearity is superimposed on another, and to fully explain the movements of the characters in time, it is necessary to draw a diagram of the multiverse with intersecting timelines, it is possible only after considerable effort.

Sensational photographs, videos, and eyewitness accounts surface again and again on the Internet, which are immediately accepted as irrefutable evidence of the existence of time travelers. The ten most ridiculous arguments of those who are trying to justify the possibility of traveling to the past and the future are collected in this article.

On the back cover of this "watch" supposedly there is an engraving "Swiss"

In December 2008, Chinese archaeologists discovered an ancient tomb. The tomb in Shanxi province, they believe, remained untouched for 400 years.

Before the archaeologists could open the coffin, a strange metal object resembling a ring was discovered in the ground next to it. Upon closer examination, it turned out that it was a tiny gold clock, the frozen hands of which indicated five past ten. The case back was engraved with the word "Swiss" ("Made in Switzerland"). A watch of this model cannot possibly be more than a hundred years old. So how did they end up in the ground above a sealed tomb during the Ming Dynasty (1368 - 1644)? Is there really a traveler from the future involved here?

Perhaps the Chinese archaeologists just wanted to draw a little attention to their hard and underestimated work, and just in time they found an ordinary ring that has a funny resemblance to modern watches. It remains only to take a couple of photos, carefully avoiding the angle from which the coveted back cover with the “Swiss” engraving will be visible, and trumpet about the sensational discovery of the media.

Moberly-Jourdain incident

Marie Antoinette, Queen of France from 1774 to 1792, met by time travelers from 1901

Time travel reports are, of course, not limited to the modern era. Descriptions of such cases periodically occur over the course of many decades. One of them is dated August 10, 1901.

Two English teachers, Charlotte Mauberly and Eleanor Jourdain, who were on holiday in France, decided to visit the Petit Trianon castle, but were not familiar with the surroundings of Versailles. Having gone astray, they finally reached their destination... 112 years earlier.

Travelers recall seeing a woman shaking a white tablecloth out of a window and an abandoned farm in the distance before something strange began to happen.

“Everything around suddenly became unnatural, unpleasant,” writes Jourdain. - Even the trees have become as if flat and lifeless, like a pattern on a carpet. There was no light, no shadow, and the air was perfectly still."

After some time, Mauberly and Jourdain ran into a group of people dressed in the fashion of the late 18th century, who showed them the way to the palace. And on the steps of the palace they met the French queen herself, Marie Antoinette.

Somehow, the travelers managed to return to their 1901 rented apartment. Taking pseudonyms, they wrote a book about their adventure, which was received very ambiguously by the public. Someone considered their story a hoax, someone - a hallucination or a meeting with ghosts.

There are also more mundane versions: Mauberly and Jourdain witnessed a historical reconstruction, or simply wrote a fantastic story inspired by H. G. Wells' Time Machine, published in 1895.

Pilot's journey to Scotland of the future

Illustration for the film "The Night I Die", in which an official predicts a plane crash

The life of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Victor Goddard was full of strange inexplicable cases. For example, one day his plane crashed exactly as in a dream that one of his acquaintances told him about shortly before. This incident formed the basis of the film The Night I Die. And in 1975, Goddard published a photo in which you can allegedly see a ghost.

Long before the release of the film and gaining fame among fans of mysticism, Goddard was an ordinary Air Force pilot who went through the First and Second World Wars. He has also lectured in engineering at Jesus College, Cambridge and Imperial College London. In 1935 he was appointed Deputy Director of Intelligence for the RAF. Apparently, the British government considered Goddard to be a completely sane person without the slightest hint of paranormality, but in pop culture a different opinion has developed.

In his book Time Travel: New Perspectives, the Irish writer D. H. Brennan recounts a strange incident that supposedly happened to Goddard while inspecting an abandoned airfield near Edinburgh in 1935. The airfield was dilapidated and dilapidated; Grass was breaking out from under the asphalt, which was chewed by local cows. On the way home, Goddard got into a storm and was forced to return. On approaching the abandoned airfield, he was surprised to find that the storm suddenly stopped, and the sun came out, and the airfield itself was completely transformed. It was repaired, mechanics in blue overalls scurried along it, and four yellow aircraft of an unknown model to Goddard stood on the runway. The pilot did not land and did not tell anyone about what he saw. Four years later, the RAF began painting planes yellow and mechanics began to wear blue uniforms, just like in his vision.

It is a pity, after all, that Goddard did not land at the airfield of the future and did not bring any artifact from there. Then, perhaps, there would be at least some basis for believing his words.

An unknown artist's fantasy of what the secret Philadelphia experiment might have looked like

The US Navy is known for its interest in dangerous futuristic technology, from mind control and psychological weapons to robots and time travel. The legend of the Philadelphia Experiment says that on October 28, 1943, they conducted a secret experiment, codenamed "Project Rainbow", during which the destroyer Eldridge was supposed to become invisible to enemy radars, but instead went 10 seconds into the past.

Reports of this experiment are somewhat vague and the US Navy has never confirmed that it actually took place, but of course no one believes the US government and the rumors continue to circulate.

Some argue that the ship experiment is based on the unified field theory developed by Albert Einstein. Allegedly, in accordance with this theory, a special electromagnetic field was created around the ship, which caused the "bending" of light, and with it the entire space-time continuum, due to which the ship became invisible and moved in time. But for some reason, everyone forgot about this amazing technology immediately after the experiment. Including the sailors who served on that destroyer, unanimously claiming that some crazy person invented this whole story.

Montauk Project

Frightening-looking radar in Montauk leads locals to believe that secret experiments are being carried out somewhere nearby.

And again about the secrets of the American government, the distrust of which among the people has only increased in recent years because of the story of Edward Snowden. Project Montac, like Rainbow, is highly classified and involves electromagnetic fields. Frightening experiments, including time travel, are allegedly being conducted at the Camp Hero air station in the city of Montauk near New York.

The founder of the legend is the American writer Preston Nichols, who claims that he managed to restore his memory, which was erased after his participation in time travel experiments. According to his own words, Nichols holds a degree in parapsychology. He dedicated a YouTube video to his experience of time travel, and it must be said that it is rather strange.

Let's try to be as unbiased as possible given the above facts. Nichols claims that the U.S. government is conducting secret mind control experiments, and this may be true if you think about Project MK Ultra, a secret CIA program aimed at finding ways to manipulate the human mind with the help of psychotropic drugs.

That's just one thing drugs and interrogation methods, and quite another - electromagnetic fields and time travel. The influence of electromagnetic fields on human consciousness or the space-time continuum has not yet been proven anywhere and by anyone.

The Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator built on the border between France and Switzerland.

There are very few real experts at the Hadron Collider. Why, most people can't even pronounce its name correctly. And yet everyone has their own opinion about what researchers at CERN do. Some are convinced that a time machine is being built there - what else can all these complex devices be needed for, if not for the realization of our fantasies inspired by science fiction films?

To date, the LHC is the most complex experimental facility in the world. It is located at a depth of 175 meters above the ground. In the “ring” of the accelerator, which is almost 27 thousand meters long, protons collide at a speed close to the speed of light. Both scientists and the press are concerned that the operation of the collider could create black holes. However, after several launches of the installation, nothing of the kind has happened yet, but in 2012 the Higgs boson was discovered. It was because of him that the rumor began that the LHC was the first step towards building a time machine.

Physicists Tom Weiler and Chui Meng Ho of Vanderbilt University suggest that in the future it will be possible to detect another particle - the Higgs singlet, which has incredible properties that violate causal relationships. According to the hypothesis of scientists, this particle is able to move into the fifth dimension and move in time in any direction, into the past and into the future. "Our theory may seem presumptuous," Weiler says, "but it doesn't defy the laws of physics."

Unfortunately, it is difficult for an ordinary person, far from physics, to check whether this is really so. We have to take the word of the authors of the theory.

Mobile phones in old movies

This elderly woman, who can be seen in the extra footage for Charlie Chaplin's The Circus, appears to be talking on a cell phone (1928)

The Internet user community is the greatest detective mind in history. Reddit users have been investigating the Boston bombing in 2013, another group of volunteers are looking for scammers online, and everyone else is busy looking for evidence of time travel in the most unlikely places. For example, attentive detectives found an interesting fragment on the DVD edition of Charlie Chaplin's film "The Circus", which they immediately uploaded to YouTube. When the film's extras show the crowd gathered for the opening night outside Grauman's Chinese Theater in 1928, a woman can be seen talking on a cell phone in the background.

Or rather, with this quality of the video, we can only say with certainty that she really holds something near her ear. Historians cooled the general ardor, saying that this may be one of the first models of the Siemens hearing aid, but this version did not seem convincing enough to conspiracy theorists. They found another video, this one from 1938, of a girl talking on a mobile phone, who would hardly need a hearing aid. Still, it's not very convincing. Maybe we need more old videos of people holding something to their ear and talking.

And in the following excerpt from the 1948 film, our contemporaries stubbornly see the iPhone at 18 seconds. Have you ever wondered how people traveled in carriages without GPS? It turns out they had to use smartphones! In fact, the actor in the video is holding an ordinary notebook, and Internet detectives should look for something more convincing.

Immortal Nicolas Cage

Double Nicolas Cage from the XIX century

It's hard to imagine anyone taking this seriously, but it's quite popular on the internet to search for vintage photographs and portraits of people who look like modern-day celebrities. Here, for example, is a copy of Nicolas Cage from the 19th century. The uninformed compilers of the textbook in which the photo appeared claim that it depicts Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico. How could they not notice such a striking resemblance to the actor from National Treasure and Ghost Rider?

Of course, this case is far from the first and not the only one. Widely known portraits of Keanu Reeves in 1570 and 1875 and a photograph of John Travolta from 1860.

Keanu Reeves with a "double" from the past

John Travolta - Vampire or Time Traveler?

Opinions differ regarding such coincidences. Someone claims that all these actors are immortal vampires, and someone considers them to be time travelers. Cage himself on the David Letterman show denied the version of his vampirism, so only the second option remains.

Apparently, Hollywood has a secret time machine at its disposal specifically to help actors better prepare for roles in historical films. But irresponsible actors perceive it as an additional vacation: they take pictures, they rule Mexico ... Well, what kind of people.

John Titor

One of the drawings of John Titor, with which he tried to explain the device of his time machine

It turns out that on the Internet you can find not only evidence of time travel, but also the travelers themselves. Today, however, we all fall into this category: one has only to look at the news feed for five minutes, and three hours are gone.

At the beginning of the 2000s, social networks were not so popular. In those days, people communicated on the so-called boards - forums that look rather unusual for us today. To start a conversation, you had to start a new topic. The author of one of the popular themes was a certain John Titor, who claimed that he arrived from the year 2036, and cited a number of predictions to support his words.

Some of them were rather vague, some more specific. Titor claimed that America of the future was on the verge of destruction due to a nuclear attack, after which it broke up into five regions. Most other countries have ceased to exist. He also posted blueprints for his time machine, but no one ever tried to build something from them. None of his predictions have come true so far.

What can I say, on the Internet you can really be anyone. I wonder why no one pretends to be a time traveler today? Is pretending to be a celebrity more interesting?

Leakage of information from the future

The researcher is waiting for the appearance of messages from the future on the Internet

And again about the Internet. John Titor and others like him simply could not leave the people of science indifferent.

Robert Nemirov and Teresa Wilson of Michigan Technological University have been scouring the web for years for traces that time travelers might have left. To do this, they use special Google magic to look for references to certain events that are dated earlier than these events actually happened, for example, information about the comet C / 2012 S1 that appeared before 2012, or the phrase "Pope Francis" that appeared somewhere or until March 2013, in which Francis was elected pope. It is assumed that if time travelers use the Internet to communicate, then somewhere their phrases must be found that do not correspond to their date. Agree, the idea is quite interesting. So what did the researchers find? - you ask.

Nothing. There are no information traces of time travelers on the Internet. As if comforting those whose hopes have been shattered, the scientists write: “Although the study did not confirm that there are time travelers from the future among us using the Internet to communicate, it is also possible that they simply cannot leave any traces of their stay in the past, even intangible . In addition, discovering information about them may be impossible for us, since this would be a violation of some of the laws of physics known today. Finally, time travelers may not want to be found and carefully cover their tracks.”

It turns out that time travelers exist, they are just invisible, hiding and cannot leave any traces! Very convincing, isn't it?

Time travel is not as mysterious as it seems. Theoretically, it is enough just to accelerate to a speed exceeding the speed of light, and you will find yourself in the future. But no one knows yet how to do it. There is another problem: you will not be able to return, because this would violate the causal relationship. Therefore, as Stephen Hawking said: "Time travel is possible, but useless."